The Best Audio Search Engines

Search tools for finding music and other audio files

By
Tim Fisher
Photo of Tim Fisher, Lifewire GM and Writer
Tim Fisher
Senior Vice President & Group General Manager, Tech & Sustainability
  • Emporia State University

Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the SVP and General Manager of Lifewire.

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Updated on December 22, 2021

An audio search tool is the best way to find all types of audio content, from short clips, sound effects, and interviews to full songs, audiobooks, and podcasts.

Using a music search engine or some other sound search tool is usually pretty straightforward: enter a search term or browse the listing for sound files.

Not all search engines work the same way. For example, DuckDuckGo and Dogpile are useful for finding web pages and images, and while Google can be used to locate files on the web, there isn't a dedicated audio finder.

Best Audio Search Engines

An audio search engine lets you search for sounds across the web, and they're always updating with new information.

FindSounds

FindSounds audio search engine

FindSounds searches the web for sound effects, instrument samples, and other sounds in a variety of formats (e.g., MP3, WAV, AIF). You can search using keywords or browse for sound files by category. Direct download links to the files are provided.

Audioburst

Screenshot of Audioburst sound search results

Audioburst is extremely unique because it lets you perform an audio search across millions of minutes of sound from podcasts, TV, and radio stations. If you're looking for a quick way to search recent news recordings for specific keywords, this is the place to be.

MP3Juices

MP3Juices website

MP3Juices is a free MP3 audio search engine. It lets you select up to seven sources to run a sound search on: YouTube, SoundCloud, VK, Yandex, 4shared, PromoDj, and Archive.org. You can download and stream the audio it finds.

Listen Notes

Screenshot of the Listen Notes audio search website

Listen Notes is a podcast search engine. Type a word or phrase to perform an audio lookup across tens of millions of podcast episodes and interviews.

Other Audio Search Methods

There are lots of other audio search tools that aren't necessarily considered search engines like the ones listed above but do still serve the purpose of helping you find audio in many forms. For example, some music search engines are really just a collection of audio files, not a method for scouring the web for music.

Reverse Audio Search

  • Shazam: A mobile app and Chrome extension where you can run an audio search by audio instead of text. Feed the app a sound and have it determine the title and more information like the artist and possibly lyrics, great for when you need to identify an unknown song.
  • Picard: Cross-platform music tagger that provides a song search feature where music can be identified by the sound alone, even without any metadata.

Specialized Audio Search Sites

  • NASA Audio: Search sounds from NASA, both from their collection of current missions and historic spaceflights. Audio is separated into categories like Beeps and Bites, Sounds of the Future, Shuttle and Station, and Discovery.
  • Internet Archive's Audio Archive: Millions of free audio files are available here, and it's frequently updated. Includes radio programs, mixtapes, podcasts, samples, audiobooks, news, and more.
  • History.com Speeches: Listen to hundreds of famous speeches and other audio clips that have made history.
  • SermonAudio: Search for and stream MP3 sermons.

Streaming Music Services

  • Pandora: One of the most popular ways to search for free and paid music. Finds audio related to the titles you search for, letting you make your own custom music stations.
  • iHeartRadio: Great for running a wide audio search to find radio stations in the US and Mexico.

Audiobook Websites

Torrent websites are another way to find audio files online. It's hard to recommend them because it's far too easy to stumble on copyrighted files, but they are an option if you're interested.

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